An inspiring account from one of history’s darkest moments. Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. This is her story. As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo.

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Audible Editor Reviews

Countless memoirs have been written about the Holocaust, but Marione Ingram's unflinching The Hands of War is unique because of the tragic irony at its center: that anti-Semitism may have saved her life after a shelter she was denied access to was bombed by the Allies.

This is just one of many remarkable stories in Ingram's emotional and deeply personal account of the ultimate of human atrocities. Teresa DeBerry delicately balances the sense of urgency, despair, and hope prevalent in the work, making for an entrancing and rewarding listen.

Publisher's Summary

An inspiring account from one of history’s darkest moments.

Marione Ingram grew up in Hamburg, Germany, in the late 1930s and early 1940s. She was German. She was Jewish. She was a survivor. This is her story.

As a young girl, Marione was aware that people of the Jewish faith were regarded as outsiders, the supposed root of Germany’s many problems. She grew up in an apartment building where neighbors were more than happy to report Jews to the Gestapo. Marione’s mother attempted suicide after receiving a deportation notice - Marione revived her, but then the bombs started to fall, as the Allies leveled the city in eight straight days of bombings. Somehow Marione and her mother and sister survived the devastating firestorms - more than 40,000 perished, and almost the same number were wounded.

Marione and her family miraculously escaped and sought shelter with a contact in the countryside, who grudgingly agreed to house them in a shed for more than a year. With the war drawing to a close, they went west, back to Hamburg. There they encountered Allied troops, who reinstalled the local government (made up of ex-Nazis) in order to keep order in the country. Life took on the air of what it used to be. Jews were still second-class citizens.

Marione eventually took shelter at a children’s home in a mansion once owned by wealthy Jewish bankers. There she met Uri, a troubled orphan and another one of the "Children of Blankenese". Uri’s story, a bleak tale of life in the concentration camps, explores a different side of the Nazi terror in Germany.

In this stirring account of World War II through the eyes of a child, the author's eloquent narrative will elicit compassion from listeners.

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